email turn-about

For a long time now, I couldn’t get email notices from this blog site (yes, the one you are reading right now). It took me a while to figure out the reasons for this problem, but it’s finally solved. I actually filter my email for spam 3 times. Spam is awful… well, I don’t need to tell you how bad it is. When I get email, it first gets filtered via my server and Spam Assassin, a commonly used server-side spam filter. From there, the email goes to two places, it goes to my Spamcop email filtering service and it goes to my gmail account. Spamcop filters the mail and sends it back to a secret account from which I retrieve the email via Thunderbird, which filters the email a third time. On the Gmail side, it just gets filtered the one time and stays there in case I need to check my email from online.

Anyway, wordpress blogs send email notifications from wordpress@yourdomain.com (yourdomain being… well, your domain). But that’s a great way to get even more spam, so I don’t have it setup to receive email. Although Spamcop claims not to check for the sending email address validity, it would reject those emails and I wouldn’t see them (unless they caught my eye on gmail).

Well, needless to say, I had to setup wordpress@yourdomain.com (actually at mydomain, but you get the idea). Now I am getting those email from here. At least I now should know when I am getting comments here. lol.

Am I overly redundant in trying to stop spam? I don’t think so. I don’t get too much spam considering all the domain names (currently 36) and email addresses (only about 20) I have to keep my eye on. And it’s great(!!!) not to have to download that spam just to filter it locally.

However, the biggest problem now is caused by spoofing. That’s when someone sends email from your email address… not literally from your server, but pretending to be you. Then you get thousands of bounce backs from those email addresses that don’t exist. I’d love to hear about a solution for that!

Posted in: General »  by: foyleman

3 Responses to “email turn-about”

1. supersword  Says:
   May 9th, 2008 at 10:52 am

   Snap! I was posting something just like this over on my blog yesterday but was too tired to finish it and saved it. I come over here to see what you are talking about I saw this.

   I hate spam. I seem to be getting alot more since I moved to a new host though. I should take some time to learn the filtering options with Outlook. That or I go back to Thunderbird.

2. foyleman  Says:
   May 9th, 2008 at 11:38 am

   You see? I got this alert that you posted here this time.

   I don’t know the value of outlook spam filtering. I just like Thunderbird better, especially since backup and reinstallation is as easy as copy/pasting a folder.

   I think my spam volume doubled as of April 21st. Something about that week that just flooded the world.

3. Playername  Says:
   May 12th, 2008 at 9:04 pm

   lol no one knows spam like my brother does… 300 new emails a day… he is retarded and signs up for everything. That is why…

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